Attract people who think you’re AWESOME (online and in real life)

this advice is so simple that the only thing that actually makes it qualify as a life hack is that just nobody will do it all right in fact everybody knows this piece of advice everybody's heard of it so I'm going to say it to you and you're be like yeah I know that but that only magnifies the question which is if you already know that then why don't you do it and how how am I so sure you don't do it well I'm not sure that you don't do it but 99% of people don't do it so what is it and again I know you know this already so you're going to I'm going to say to you you're going to be like I know that but before you judge so quickly and dismiss and say I know that then then ask yourself yeah I know that you know that but if you know that then why don't you do it and what is it it's called being yourself oh I know that I told you you're going to say that but when I say be yourself what I mean is this let's start with just this forum which we're using right now to communicate I know it's a bit of a one-sided communication right now I'm talking to you you're listening but YouTube okay so maybe you are a content creator on YouTube maybe you're not but you maintain some type of social media presence because most people today maintain some type of social media presence my question for you is like this to what extent if you use it for business you use it for social reasons whatever it is maybe use it as a hobby maybe use it for your art but to what extent do you curate your content what I mean is you are choosing what to put out there and my question is what basis are you using to choose what you put out there and maybe this is an explicit thought on your part or maybe it's just subconscious for many of us it's just an unspoken desire for social acceptance but most of us the content that we put out there that others are going to see is based on a question of what we think others will will respond favorably to and I don't mean that we're just trying to Curry favor and be liked and we're trying to get likes and we're we're trying to get approval and validation I me yes that too I mean we are human but I'm saying even when we think about a message we're trying to communicate we want to inspire people we want to move people we want to educate people we're thinking an awful lot about how the listener how the receiver is going to take it and based on that we're choosing what to say and how to say it which is not a bad thing by the way it's not a bad thing to be sensitive and aware to the way your listener is going to receive a message but here's the pitfall here's the Trap what ends up happening is that we suppress parts of ourselves certain aspects of who we are whether it's our nature or our nurture but each one of us is this Marvel marous Confluence of innumerable factors that come together in this unique combination of ways that makes you the only you in the entire world okay but what we do is we start to select we start to judge certain aspects of our personalities or of our interests and and and and we say that's not good for public consumption and we start to self-censor until we're left with what we believe is palatable to the masses right lowest common denominator another word for that is pandering so my question is like this after you've Stripped Away everything that makes you quirky and unique and idiosyncratic what you're left with is this sort of one siiz fits-all vanilla version of you okay no no insult to vanilla by the way if and by the way if you like vanilla if you actually like vanilla then go all the way vanilla okay what I'm saying is let's say you're a rocky road let's say you're a cookies and cream let's say you're uh let's get really funky um is pistachio funky okay but whatever let's say you're pistachio uh I love pistachio ice cream okay and you say but a lot of people don't like it it's got the chunks and the nuts and it and it's green colored you know let me be vanilla CU more people like vanilla than pistachio here's what I'm going to tell you when once you start selectively going through your personality and and censoring it and I don't mean censoring it like cuz it's not politically correct I mean censoring it because you think it's not popular enough or palatable enough here's what happens you slowly chip away at everything that makes you you and now you are in competition with all the other people who are doing the exact same thing and you really think that you are going to be the best panderer in the whole world I'll tell you something you're not just competing with all the individuals who are trying to Pander you're competing with entire industries that spend trillions of dollars a year figuring out and they have focus groups and they they do surveys they have a scientific method how to Pander and to be the lowest common denominator and you're going to compete with all that when it's so simple like I said it's deceptively simple but no one will do it because it's terrifying if you really want to stand out if you really want to attract your audience and the whole world can't be your audience okay but you do have an audience every one of us has something relevant for a certain segment of the population right if you want to find those people or better yet I should say more accurately if you want those people to find you why are you suppressing aspects of yourself why are you camouflaging yourself to the contrary everything that is unique about you play it up play it up so I'll tell you that I learned this it was very therapeutic for me it was very healing in my real life I learned this because of YouTube and other social media I learned that there were certain things okay like for instance a lot of my classes I'll open with a joke because there's a Tomic tradition of loosening up the crowd with a joke and creating a rapport um and but my jokes are not meant to be funny my jokes are whatever they're they're amusing to me sometimes they're they're they bomb okay I'll just say my my joke's bomb so a lot of times I would like when I'd upload these classes I would cut those jokes I would like edit it out I don't want to put a joke that bombed but then I realized hold on a second but that's me that's what I actually do it's like not like I'm trying to bomb but that's the reality my opening jok's always bomb and when I started to include to include those what happened is the people who I'm speaking to were more easily able to find my classes and to find my content and the engagement went up and the quality of comments went up and all I had to do was just stop editing myself stop censoring myself okay so let's say you like bowling and you say well bowling's not a popular enough past temp but football is much more popular than bowling let me speak about football why why are you doing that and let's say let's add a second factor to it let's say you like Latin and let's say you want to put out a video about bowling and Latin and you're going to say well that's crazy bowling is a niche interest and Latin is a niche interest and a niche of a niche and I'm ruling out 99.9% of people okay maybe you are but first of all I'll get back to that first of all what about the 0.1% of people who are going to really get excited about bowling in Latin but okay that's first of all but secondly the 99.9% of people you know what they respond to they respond to Passion they respond to authenticity so they may not care about bowling they may not care about Latin but if they see a guy really or a gal being really authentic and comfortable and just in the zone flowing in that you know creative Flow State talking about bowling and Latin you know what a lot lot of people are just going to watch that just to see somebody comfortable with their own creativity because it's exhilarating okay and then they end up becoming bowling enthusiasts or at least for that you know the duration of that video all of a sudden bowling becomes interesting you know it's like when you meet somebody and you like that person and you take interest in what they're interested in so you know a guy is dating a girl and uh he likes her and she says that she's into stamp collecting he never really thought about stamp collecting but all of a sudden if somebody he likes is interested in it stamp collecting all of a sudden become becomes interesting and all of a sudden he says to her you know I was on eBay the other day and I was looking is that a good stamp I I I saw they were selling that stamp he never looked for that stamp before but he found somebody he's interested in who's interested in that and the subject becomes interesting by association so that's what I'm telling you people connect to people they connect to your pess and whatever brings out your Humanity the most and others whatever you're whatever you're passionate about like for instance right now this channel is I'm a rabbi and this channel is about Jewish mysticism and a lot of the content on here is Torah classes and a lot of it's like explaining uh Hebrew texts and you know that doesn't have the highest engagement doesn't have the most views but I I put out anything that's interesting to me now so like right now I like to make observations about The Human Condition uh based on my personal experiences this is one of this is a perfect example so I I'll ask you were you looking for a cidic rabbi speaking about authenticity on social media no but you know what the algorithm figured out that you might be interested in that and just gave it to you and hey look how you're uh 10 minutes deep into this video and you haven't clicked away yet so obviously something's working right all right but that was something that took me years that took me years years to think that I should just do the simplest thing the easiest thing and talk about whatever I'm interested in and that people will find me more easily that way instead of blending into the crowd and hiding from the people who want to find me now I just do the simplest thing and whatever I find interesting I'm putting it out there and here here's the kicker this doesn't just work in social media this works Works in real life this is to me the greatest Moment of clarity in a lifetime of struggling with social anxiety and and and and fear of rejection be the fullest version of yourself so that the people who are who have been looking for the person that you are they've been looking for they've been looking for you their whole life life and they don't know it when they find you you should be the fullest version of yourself so they'll know that they found you and don't accidentally Walk On By CU you were keeping your head down and trying to look like everybody else